On my recent trip to Austria, I had a wonderfully leisurely lunch at a great restaurant in Salzburg - the Purzelbaum. Leaving everything on the menu aside that didn't immediately yell "Austrian", I ordered pumkin soup with pumpkin seed oil, apricot dumplings and an absolutely amazing main of venison.
Being a foodblogger, I have a nasty habit of re-creating a lot of the restaurant dishes I like in my own kitchen and this was no exception. We had some friends over who are probably the best guests you could wish for, as they eat absolutely everything - no allergies, no special diets and certainly no pickiness. So I had to seize the opportunity and make something other people might be hesitant about and so I decided on venison even if it is not the height of the season. The thing though is that here in the UK we are incredibly lucky to have some dedicated producers who rear game in their own parks and can pretty much provide meat all year round - whether breeding deer for consumption like domestic animals affects the quality of the meat, I can't say. The fillet I got last weekend was absolutely perfect, in any case, very tasty meat and very, very lean, but incredibly tender.
So there I was, in my own kitchen, doing my best to mirror what I had had at the Purzelbaum a few weeks earlier: fillet of venison, pan-seared and cut into medallions, an aromatic sauce which I made with portwine and orange juice, fresh cep mushrooms sauteed with shallots and parsley, bread dumplings with black truffles and fruity red cabbage. Unfortunately, I had to use one of the things I loathe and this experiment proved it again: as fresh truffles were nowhere to be found, I had to resort to supermarket truffles in a glass... which might have been OK visually, but added absolutely nothing to the taste. I could just have left them out, but I can be a bit stubborn at times ;-)
But all in all, this is something that will get a firm place in my repertoire - not only was the venison tasty and gorgeous, it was easy to make and I fell in love with the sides which were really good enough to have on their own... recipes here!
And before you cry out "ah, but the meat is overcooked!" - I can assure you it wasn't... but in the heat of preparations, I completely forgot to get our my camera and could only take a picture of left-overs the next day and of course, the meat had rested too much by then... it was perfect the night before though!
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